Powerful committees in the U.S. Congress held hearings on Tuesday on insulin affordability and high prescription drug prices, an issue both chambers have said is a top priority for the year.

The House Oversight Committee, chaired by Democratic Representative Elijah Cummings, and the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, brought in patient advocates and health policy experts to discuss the burden of high drug costs on consumers and sky-rocketing prices.

Both committees also focused on insulin, which those with type 1 diabetes and some with type 2 diabetes depend on.

High prescription drug costs have consistently polled as a top voter concern and have been a top priority of the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.

It remains unclear whether Democrats, who control the U.S. House of Representatives, and Republicans, who control the U.S. Senate, will find a bipartisan way to address rising drug costs.

The annual cost of insulin for treating a type 1 diabetes patient in the United States nearly doubled from 2012 to 2016 to $5,705 from $2,864, according to a recent study.

Cummings earlier this month sent letters to 12 pharmaceutical companies asking for detailed information on their pricing practices. He focused on medicines whose costs rose the most over the last five years, including several diabetes medications.

Democrats in the Senate and House earlier this month, including Cummings, also introduced a series of bills aimed at bringing down drug costs. No Republicans have signed onto the legislation.

Ron Wyden, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement that the committee invited the heads of several large drug companies to testify on Tuesday, but none were willing to come.

Aetna, a CVS Health business, announced the launch of Attain, a unique health experience designed by Aetna in collaboration with Apple.

Using  an Apple Watch, the Attain app will provide Aetna members personalized goals, track their daily activity levels, recommend healthy actions, and ultimately reward them for taking these actions to improve their well-being. Reward opportunities include the ability for eligible users to earn their Apple Watch through their participation in the program.

This launch builds on the 2016 collaboration between Aetna and Apple in which 90 percent of participants reported a health benefit from their use of Apple Watch.

The Attain app claims to be the first of its kind – designed specifically to offer users a personalized experience that combines their health history with the power of the Apple Watch to help them achieve better health and well-being.

After users have joined Attain, they will have the additional option to share their Attain program data and health history with Apple, enabling Apple and Aetna to collaborate, and over time, continue to improve the Attain experience. Through analytics and machine learning, the collaboration will lead to new features for Attain, offering more personalized recommendations designed to give greater context and decrease barriers to health care.

The developers say user privacy and data security are at the heart of Attain. A completely voluntary program, members determine what information they want to share and can discontinue using Attain at any time. All Attain health data is encrypted on the device, in transit, and on Aetna and Apple’s servers, where it will be stored in a highly secure environment using industry-leading practices fully in compliance with HIPAA.

Information from this program will not be used for underwriting, premium or coverage decisions.

Health history data is tightly regulated by the U.S. government, and Apple and Aetna had to enter into what is known as a business associate agreement in order for Aetna to share it with the Apple. Access to regulated data is necessary for some of the functions of the app, such as recommending age-appropriate exercise or a lower-cost option for scheduled lab tests or MRI imaging tests.

The Attain rewards platform builds off a program developed by Vitality Group, a model that has demonstrated that incentives linked to the Apple Watch are associated with increased, sustained activity. A recent study from RAND corporation found an average 34 percent increase in activity levels for participants using the rewards platform incorporated in Attain with Apple Watch, compared to those without these incentives – leading to an additional 4.8 days of activity per month.

Interested Aetna members are encouraged to sign up at www.AttainbyAetna.com to be notified when the App becomes available for download.

A new study, Correlates of Opioid Dispensing, published by the Workers Compensation Research Institute (WCRI) identifies characteristics of injured workers and their employers that are associated with differences in opioid dispensing rates.

The study analyzed a range of possible correlates, including worker (age, gender), injury (type of injury), industry (industry group and employer’s payroll size), and location (county-level opioid dispensing rate, urban-rural classification, and health insurance coverage rate) characteristics. The following are some sample findings from the study:

– Industry: For the same injuries, workers employed in mining and construction who received pain medications were more likely to receive opioids, as well as to receive opioids on a longer-term basis and at higher doses.
– Location: Injured workers residing in counties with higher amounts of opioids dispensed per person and those residing in rural and very rural counties were more likely to receive opioid prescriptions.
– Worker’s Age: Older workers were more likely to receive opioid prescriptions compared with younger workers.
– Injury Type: A higher proportion of workers who sustained fractures, carpal tunnel, and neurologic spine pain received at least one opioid prescription for pain relief.

The data used for this analysis included 1.4 million pain medication prescriptions filled within 18 months postinjury for injuries that occurred between October 1, 2014, and September 30, 2015, in 27 states.

The states are Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

The study was authored by WCRI’s Dr. Vennela Thumula and Te-Chun Liu. WCRI received funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to support this study. To learn more about this study or to purchase a copy, visit WCRI’s website at https://www.wcrinet.org/reports/correlates-of-opioid-dispensing.

Members of a federal task force have arrested an attorney on narcotics distribution charges after detectives spent months following the woman and monitoring her drug sales on Craigslist. Prosecutors allege she illegally sold oxycodone pills after offering drugs for sale.

Jackie Ferrari, 36, a resident of Downey, who investigators believe recently started a new job at a Beverly Hills law firm, was arrested late Friday without incident by law enforcement officers affiliated with the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) Task Force, which operates under the direction of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The criminal complaint filed on January 15 and unsealed this week specifically charges Ferrari with one count of distributing a controlled substance.

The affidavit in support of the complaint states that a law enforcement source with a long history of purchasing narcotics from Ferrari made a buy earlier this month in which Ferrari sold the informant 50 oxycodone pills for $1,200. Ferrari subsequently sent the informant and other likely customers a text message that she “recently obtained a new supply of oxycodone and [had] other drugs available for sale,” according to the affidavit.

The investigation into Ferrari began after a 22-year-old woman died in August of a fentanyl overdose, and text messages on the victim’s phone initially indicated she may have purchased the narcotics from Ferrari. While investigators currently do not believe that Ferrari sold the narcotics that led to the overdose death, they have continued to investigate her based on evidence that she is a large-scale trafficker in opiates via the website Craigslist.  

The affidavit also notes that records obtained from Craigslist pursuant to a subpoena demonstrate Ferrari’s long history of posting advertisements for the sale of narcotics using coded names such as “roxy dolls” (i.e., Roxicodone, a short-acting version of oxycodone), “Chinese **White** Rice” (i.e., “China white” or powdered heroin, which is often mixed with fentanyl) and “Black Rice” (i.e., black tar heroin).

Ferrari waived the option of a preliminary hearing and was released on $25,000 bond, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office. If convicted of the charge in the criminal complaint, Ferrari would face a statutory maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison.

A Riverside County judge has unsealed indictments against eight people accused of operating an international conspiracy to defraud the California workers’ compensation system of more than $123 million.

In March 2017, the Riverside and San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Offices began an investigation into Blue Oak Medical Group. The evidence was presented to a Riverside County criminal grand jury which, after hearing six weeks of testimony, handed down indictments on Jan. 17, 2019.

The indictments, which were unsealed by Superior Court Judge O.G. Magno on Tuesday, name Kenneth Amodeo, 60, of Agoura Hills; Rosa Bernal, 46, of Covina; Shannon Devane, 41, of Downey; Janek Hunt, a 44-year-old Estonian national; Edgar Lozano, 52, of Porter Ranch; Matthew Rifat, 49, of El Cajon; Hector Sandoval, 54, of Sherman Oaks; and Munir Uwaydah, a 52-year-old Lebanese national.

Amodeo is a pharmacist, Rifat is an attorney, and Uwaydah is a physician whose license currently is not active. Uwaydah has been under indictment in Los Angeles County in a related case since 2015.

The next court date for Amodeo, Bernal, and Lozano is Feb. 6, 2019, for arraignment and the next court date for Devane, Hunt, and Rifat, is Feb. 26, 2019, for a trial readiness conference. Defendants Sandoval and Uwaydah are not in custody and arrest warrants have been issued.

The eight defendants in this case are charged with a variety of counts including conspiracy, fraud, and money laundering and sentence-enhancing white-collar crime allegations.

Amodeo, Bernal and Lozano were each being held in lieu of $4.7 million bail at the Smith Correctional Facility in Banning; Devane and Rifat were each being held in lieu of $4.7 million at the Robert Presley Jail in Riverside; and Hunt was being held in lieu of $4.7 million at the Byrd Detention Center in Murrieta. Arrest warrants are pending against Sandoval and Uwaydah, neither of whom were in custody.

Based on information found in publically filed documents, the defendants used the sham clinics to take advantage of thousands of patients by prescribing nearly all of them the same high priced cocktail of unnecessary medications, regardless of the patients’ condition. Many of the medications were produced by pharmacies under the control of the defendants and the patients often received little, if any, of the medicine they were prescribed.

The defendants funneled the fraudulently obtained proceeds from the scam through a network of shell companies, ultimately sending the money to co-conspirators throughout Southern California, Europe, and the Middle East.

The investigation in this case involved multiple agencies including the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, and the California Pharmacy Board.

The cases, RIF1990022 and RIF1990023, are being prosecuted by Riverside County Deputy District Attorneys Matthew Murray, Erika Mulhere, and Kristen Allison of the DA’s Insurance Fraud Team, and San Bernardino County Deputy District Attorney Michael Chiriatti.